Posts Tagged ‘timeline’

I’m using this platform as an archive for a conversation with Kayla. A PhD candidate at The University of Melbourne; who’s doing urban mapping or in her own words:

The course I’m doing is under School of Arch & Design. My main background is Landscape Architecture and for the PhD, I look into temporary markets. I would say it’s a mix of landscape architecture + urban/city + and “the everyday” things that go in between. And yes, I’ve never thought maps and mapping could be this fascinating too. It’s amazing to see a place/city differently once they are mapped in different ways.

She’s also the sister of Nadirah who’s a photographer in New York, whom I met last month at the Work Presentation session at The Republik Studio. I still owe her the editing of last bootleg video.

Now I’m committing my passion for time-lapse with another passion of mine: infographics.

My Del.icio.us account is populated with the infographics, information visualization, information design, infosthetics, statistics and timeline analysis. I’m used to bookmark tag with Del.icio.us, now I’m in semi-comatose mode ever since the news of Yahoo going to shutdown Del.icio.us. There’s even category for del.icio.us that I use in this blog with the help of xmlrpc.php.

Before I knew of Kayla work. I’m already set off on cataloguing the urbanscape of the city and the littoral space of my hometown — demarcated space of white sand and the blue sea, with sparkling stars above.

Her work on urban mapping is a great interest of mine, as the work-in-progress that I do for month long personal project of mine, involves with night market/temporary market (pasar malam) in urban city.

It’s an exciting notion that my work could be used for someone in their intellectual pursuit in the academia world of urban planning.

I’m pretty much an accomplished motion-control time-lapse photographer/videographer, but I need help with visualizing the soundscapes of the city into some form of waveform infographics.

The visual and interface design of Mark Coleran is the best place to start for inspiration. The time-lapse footage with the visualisation of soundscape, time countdown and sun dial would be an exquisite final product.

Mark Coleran: Domino

Mark Coleran: Domino

Mark Coleran: Mission Impossible 3

Mark Coleran: Mission Impossible 3

Mark Coleran: Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

Mark Coleran: Mee-Shee: The Water Giant

Mark Coleran: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mark Coleran: Mr. & Mrs. Smith

Mark Coleran: The Island

Mark Coleran: The Island

Lovely interface design, but I’m looking for more simplistic interface.

I just realised that my personal project on urban time-lapse with the Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system have greater impact in urbanscape mapping not just in time-lapsing per se.

What’s the traffic condition, the flow of pedestrians & vehicles, the light pollution source, the hygiene indicator, the environment controller & the of course the aesthetic aspect of the light play itself on low shutter speed.

I’m doing personal motion control time-lapse with Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system at Cheras’ (or M’sia even) longest night market, every Wednesday at Taman Connaught. This is called urban mapping?

I just realised that my personal project on urban time-lapse with the Kessler Crane Elektra/Oracle system have greater impact in urbanscape mapping not just in time-lapsing per se.

What’s the traffic condition, the flow of pedestrians & vehicles, the light pollution source, the hygiene indicator, the environment controller & the of course the aesthetic aspect of the light play itself on low shutter speed.

All this from a simple time-lapse. Wow.

Yes, I would say time-lapse photograph can be a kind of mapping when we specifically know what we want to document, or “reveal”. And the best part, sometimes what we find stuff that we did not expect.

In the Lorong TAR Night Market project, I wanted to understand how the back lane is occupied across time, just like you posted: changes in how the space is utilized, flow of pedestrians & vehicles, etc. We did the same for Petaling Street and it’s amazing to see how vendors bring in their kit-of-parts to set up night stalls in the middle of the street market. It almost seemed like a choreography of some kind: they come in, they install, they vend, people come. When the market closed, they uninstall, they go out, and by midnight, the garbage collection service comes and cleans the street. By morning, everything was back to normal.

For my project, we had to do the shooting manually every half hour to every hour (thanks to my husband for shooting most of it!). If you want to shoot Lorong TAR, start shooting from the morning because the vendors start setting up their stalls as early as 10 or 11 am (we only started in the afternoon and by that time the lane was pretty much filled with tents already). And yeah, Taman Connaught Night Market is definitely the longest night market – stretching about 1km if I’m not mistaken! If you have time-lapse photos of this, hope you won’t mind sharing with me. Would love to see how the super-long night market becomes a pop-up city over the night!

By the way, I recently found some works by Olafur Eliasson that also uses time-lapse.

I would love to. I’ll be more “industrious” with my time-lapse editing this upcoming month. I’m juggling between two jobs, offshore engineering & cinematography, and time-lapse as my past-time passion.

Check my flickr and Tom Lowe’s Timescapes.org for the kind of work that I’m doing. For the flickr there’s only one time-lapse video. I’m not much a zealous uploader. I will soon, in my Vimeo account.

Thanks for the pointer. I’m cataloging a couple of night market. Taman Connaught is the hardest due to the length. And I could only make one time-lapse per week, with different perspective (usually on the elevated pathway).

I’ll try to post one of the perspective soon.

Thanks for sharing your thought. I’m very keen in architecture, urban planning and design too. I hope the time-lapse work that I done could show something about the need for better gentrification project for the Malaysian community.

The data was sourced from the city council. As in the previous map, each colour represents each day. In this map, the tallest bar represents the highest number of stalls, which marks the largest or longest night market. Now that I’m taking a second look at this, Pasar Malam Taman Sri Petaling on Tuesday nights actually has 900 stalls – marked by the tallest blue bar. Pasar Malam Taman Connaught comes in second with 702 stalls. Now that we’ve seen temporary markets as an amazing phenomenon in the country, we should be able to anticipate this in our future city planning (read: phd contribution, hopefully!)

Sri Petaling (Tuesday) is near my Oil & Gas office. Taman Connaught (Wednesday) is near my apartment. The infographics and the statistics are useful in order to get the best of the time-lapse exposure. The larger the traffic, the better the flow of the time-lapse can be captured.

I agreed with the urban planning to redesign more public space i.e. temporary markets and gardens for the community. We’re choked with the concrete and the asphalt, we forget how lush the empty space are.

Now I know what I’m looking forward to this week. That, and all the the delayed editing of past videography work, and one of them is the bootleg video of your New Yorker sister last Work Presentation at The Republik. The one I uploaded at the youtube is a raw file. Grainy — should have use faster prime lens. Oh, well.

Cheers!

+++

Last night I was at the Vincent Moon & Efterklang, An Island screening at Eightyfourcube Studio. Even though it’s an acoustic short film yet soundscape of the landscape plays a vital part in the film.

Since I’ll be at the place for hours. I might as well capture the soundscape of the place and translated it into infographics of peak wave form.

There’ll be mash of time-lapse and wave-form graph. Like some wicked sci-fi movie. Hahaha. I’m just being optimistic. Is there an apps for capturing the waveform into infographics other than me just print screen the Final Cut Pro’s sound bar?

In 1980, the year of your birth, the top selling movie was Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back. People buying the popcorn in the cinema lobby had glazing eyes when looking at the poster.

Remember, that was before there were DVDs. People were indeed watching movies in the cinema, and not downloading them online. Imagine the packed seats, the laughter, the excitement, the novelty. And mostly all of that without 3D computer effects.

Do you know who won the Oscars that year? The academy award for the best movie went to Ordinary People. The Oscar for best foreign movie that year went to Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears. The top actor was Robert De Niro for his role as Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. The top actress was Sissy Spacek for her role as Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter. The best director? Robert Redford for Ordinary People.

In the year 1980, the time when you arrived on this planet, books were still popularly read on paper, not on digital devices. Trees were felled to get the word out. The number one US bestseller of the time was The Covenant by James A. Michener. Oh, that’s many years ago. Have you read that book? Have you heard of it? Look at the cover!

In 1980… U.S. President Jimmy Carter proclaims a grain embargo against the USSR with the support of the European Commission. Global Positioning System time epoch begins at 00:00 UTC. Nigel Short, 14, becomes the youngest chess player to be awarded the degree of International Master. The president of Sicily, Piersanti Mattarella, is assassinated by the Mafia. Israel and Egypt establish diplomatic relations. The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific railroad is ordered liquidated due to bankruptcy, and debt owed to creditors. Robert Mugabe is elected Prime Minister of Zimbabwe. The Silver Thursday market crash occurs. Spain and the United Kingdom agree to reopen the border between Gibraltar and Spain, closed since 1969. The Dominican embassy siege ends with all hostages released and the guerrillas flying to Cuba. Mobster Henry Hill is arrested for drug possession. Pac-Man, the best-selling arcade game of all time, is released. U.S. President Jimmy Carter signs Proclamation 4771, requiring 18- to 25-year-old males to register for a peacetime military draft, in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Ford Europe launches the Escort MK3, which ditches the traditional rear-wheel drive saloon in favour of a more practical and modern front-wheel drive hatchback. The St. Gotthard Tunnel opens in Switzerland as the world’s longest highway tunnel at 10.14 miles, 16.32 km, stretching from Goschenen to Airolo. The Washington Post publishes Janet Cooke’s story of Jimmy, an 8-year-old heroin addict, later proven to be fabricated. Digital Equipment Corporation, Intel and Xerox introduce the DIX standard for Ethernet, which is the first implementation outside of Xerox, and the first to support 10 Mbit per second speeds. The Staggers Rail Act is enacted, deregulating American railroads. The video game of the day was Space Panic.

That was the world you were born into. Since then, you and others have changed it.

The Nobel prize for Literature that year went to Czeslaw Milosz. The Nobel Peace prize went to Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. The Nobel prize for physics went to James Watson Cronin and Val Logsdon Fitch from the United States for the discovery of violations of fundamental symmetry principles in the decay of neutral K-mesons. The sensation this created was big. But it didn’t stop the planets from spinning, on and on, year by year. Years in which you would grow bigger, older, smarter, and, if you were lucky, sometimes wiser. Years in which you also lost some things. Possessions got misplaced. Memories faded. Friends parted ways. The best friends, you tried to hold on. This is what counts in life, isn’t it?

The 1980s were indeed a special decade. The Soviet-Afghan war goes on. Eastern Europe sees the collapse of communism. Policies like Perestroika and Glasnost in the Soviet Union lead to a wave of reforms. Protests are crushed down on Tiananmen Square in China. Ethiopa witnesses widespread famine. Nicolae Ceausescu is overthrown. The AIDS pandemic begins. The role of women in the workplace increased greatly. MTV is launched in the US. There is opposition against Apartheid in South Africa as well as worldwide. Heavy Metal and Hard Rock bands are extremely popular. The rise of Techno music begins. Originally primarily played on campus radio stations, College Rock enters the scene with bands like the Pixies, REM and Sonic Youth. The Hip Hop scene continues to evolve. Teletext is introduced. Gay rights become more widely accepted in the world. Opposition to nuclear power plants grows. The A-Team and Seinfeld are popular on TV. US basketball player Michael Jordan bursts on the scene. Super Mario Bros, Zelda’s Link, and Pac-Man gain fame in video games. People wear leggings, shoulder pads and Ray-Ban sunglasses.

Do you know what was on the cover of Life that year?

Do you remember the movie that was all the rage when you were 15? Seven. Do you still remember the songs playing on the radio when you were 15? Maybe it was This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan. Were you in love? Who were you in love with, do you remember?

In 1980, 15 years earlier, a long time ago, the year when you were born, the song Rock with You by Michael Jackson topped the US charts. Do you know the lyrics? Do you know the tune? Sing along.

Girl, close your eyes
Let that rhythm, get into to you
Don’t try to fight it
There ain’t nothin’ that you can do
Relax your mind
Lay back and groove with mine
You gotta feel the heat
And we can ride the boogie
Share that beat of love
…

There’s a kid outside, shouting, playing. It doesn’t care about time. It doesn’t know about time. It shouts and it plays and thinks time is forever. You were once that kid.

When you were 9, the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was playing. When you were 8, there was Willow. When you were 7, there was a Disney movie out called Oliver & Company. Does this ring a bell?

6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… it’s 1980. There’s TV noise coming from the second floor. Someone turned up the volume way too high. The sun is burning from above. These were different times. The show playing on TV is Too Close for Comfort. The sun goes down. Someone switches channels. There’s Magnum, P.I. on now. That’s the world you were born in.

Progress, year after year. Do you wonder where the world is heading towards? The technology available today would have blown your mind in 1980. Do you know what was invented in the year you were born? The Compact Disc. Flash Memory.

It was the fearful night of December 8th
He was returning home from the studio late
He had perceptively known that it wouldn’t be nice
Because in 1980, he paid the price
…

That’s from the song I Just Shot John Lennon by The Cranberries.

In 1980, a new character entered the world of comic books: Bananaman. Bang! Boom! But that’s just fiction, right? In the real world, in 1980, Christina Aguilera was born. And Christina Ricci. Venus Williams, too. And you, of course. Everyone an individual. Everyone special. Everyone taking a different path through life.
It’s 2010.